Sheesh — what is it about ‘creatives’ that makes them so profoundly prone to reductio ad absurdam (and/or the straw man fallacy)?

Code is binary (once compiled); problems, processes, objectives, and iteration procedures are analog.

Nobody pretends that good ‘design’ is an emergent property of iteration by itself: it’s an emergent property of goal-driven iteration, where part of the goal set is “Does what we want it to do in ways that are decipherable to the user… yeah, OK ‘creatives’, it should look purdy too, because everyone’s a 12 year old girl”.

So well played — you offer a solution to a problem that nobody has. I guess as possible exception is firms who are subsidised and therefore have no incentive to do things properly… people like Microsoft, Apple, and the rest of the passengers on the IP protection racket-cum-gravy train (which is why their products are insecure, underperformant shit-showers… that look real nice).

The dev world is not in some Manichean dichotomy between

(a) automaton code-wights who think that just re-doing something over and over and over (which is what iteration is) will result in ‘betterness’ (however defined) on the one hand; and

(b) deep-thinking soi-disant ‘creatives’ whose fluffy hand-waving nonsense about pastel colour gradients and rounded corners[1] will be obsolete by the time it’s coded (because the thing about ‘creatives’ is that everything must change according to fashion, and fashion must change all the time because static fashion is an oxymoron) on the other.

If you want a standard ‘dichotomy’ view of the world (as befits a 12 year old girl or a religious zealot), then divide the world up into the standard ‘10 categories’:

(0) people who develop using a structured goal-seeking iterative process with a set of objectives that include ‘design’ as a component (but not the be-all and end-all); and

(1) dickheads outside of a fairly small-δ envelope of (0).

Code is binary: problems are analog.

Lastly (since I’m here): the reason Google has a large portfolio of ‘failures’ is because the business was throwing off so much cash in the early days, that the management could afford to swing for the fences on blue-sky-ish ideas.

One of the great difficulties that very smart people often experience, is the failure to grasp that something that they might think is great and useful might be totally uncommercial as a product — because whatever it is cannot form part of the lives of a large enough segment of the target market.

Super-smart folks recognise this problem and are very circumspect with what they devote resources to… they deliberately ‘neg’ their own ideas. But the still invest in risky projects up until the point where the expected risk-adjusted return from the marginal dollar devoted to the next-riskiest project is zero.

When you’re Google, just giving a project the ‘big G’ increases its odds of success enormously, but there comes a time when some projects fall below even their very low bar for return.

Autrement dit: there is no diversified portfolio that does not include losers.

In fact, the more speculative the investment space, the more losers — and the bigger the winners : get it right, and the bigness of the winners exceeds the return required to offset the losers by several orders of magnitude.

(I shouldn’t have to type this next bit, but with ‘creatives’ anything involving uncertainty has to be explained LIFYO)

inb4 “Why not just invest in the things that are likely to be winners?”… because if ‘winners’ could be identified a priori, their higher expected payoffs would be priced in, until expected risk-adjusted excess return went to zero.

What generates excess returns (and large numbers of small losses) is identifying a group of things that all look like turds that might contain a large diamond. You wind up with turd all over your hands and a pile of torn-up turds… and a few large diamonds.

Read Pail Graham’s “Black Swan Farming” for the sort of insight that ‘creatives’ have trouble grokking (because they’re usually innumerate).

[1] I know it sounds like I’m mostly babbling about “presentation-layer prettifiers” (the archetypal ‘creative’), but I would throw in anyone who uses the words “Agile”, “Scrum”, “Kanban”. “full-stack” and other such drivel non-ironically. In other words, the thing I have a problem with are bullshitters looking to catch a ride by offering fake solutions to often-nonexistent problems faced by actual producers of things (code or not).